Thursday, September 14, 2017

Didn't you say your major was English? I got my BA in English here, too. In fact, I've taught on this campus for many years.

Mind if I sit down and give you some advice?

You remind me of a student I had in class several years ago. His name was C., and he was from Dermott. Have you heard of it?

Yeah, it's a small town. Not many people have heard of it.

Anyway, my first assignment for students was to write a story about something that had happened to them. C. asked if he could write about the way his dad was always teasing him. I said sure, but "give us only one example that shows what a joker your dad is. That's what a story is, an example."

Two weeks into class, he raised his hand and asked me if I could take a look at something. I went back to him, and he whispered in my ear, "I don't know how to make a capital letter." You see, his parents had bought him a Dell laptop as a graduation gift, and he had never had a computer before, nor, I guess, a keyboarding class. I didn't say anything because he was already embarrassed. I just showed him three times how it worked: press the shift key and, at the same time, press the letter.

I still have the story he managed to peck out with two fingers. In it, C. and his dad had gone out to feed the deer they would later hunt on their property. It started to become dark, and his dad sent him to get flashlights from an outbuilding, across an earthen bridge that separated two ponds. And he had a warning, "Be careful of that alligator." From that point on, everything in the water looked like alligator eyes peering at C., and he was terrified. When he returned with the lights, he found his father doubled-over in laughter. There were no alligators, but C. had crossed the bridge so painstakingly it was comical, the effect his dad was looking for.

He struggled mightily with that story and the other assignments, but he passed and took the next class with me in the spring. He was my student for an entire academic year. When we ran into each other between Arkansas Hall and Snow Fine Arts...you know where that is, right? Anyway, I was happy he had returned for his sophomore year because I worried he wouldn't make it. We chatted for ten minutes or so, and then he said, "Ms. D, I gotta go make sure my friends are studying. I told them I'd help." And I asked if he had recruited them into the same residential college where he had lived and taken classes. He smiled, "Yes, ma'am!" As we parted ways, I asked him to stay in touch and visit me in my office some time. He said he would.

One week.

One week later, four young men, maybe your age, drove onto this campus, and one of them shot into a crowd of people and killed C.

You saw an empty office, an unattended backpack, and an opportunity.

I assumed the fear on your face when I whipped into that unoccupied front office to answer the ringing phone there was prompted by the fact I had leapt out of nowhere. After I put the phone in its cradle, I asked how I could help you. I took you for your word. I wrote down the name of the building and room you said you were looking for and gave you directions on how to get there. I almost offered to walk you to that place, but I was the only one of my colleagues around to answer the phone. Surely, "it's the building right next to the library that way" would be enough to get you there.

I believed you.

Until you came in a second time three minutes later. Remember? I leaned back from my chair to see who had just walked in, and you immediately turned around and walked back out when you saw me. I scanned the front office and spotted my graduate assistant's backpack lying against the wall, out in the open. I unzipped it and found the MacBook Pro she worked however many jobs (they're on her résumé) to buy so she would be ready for graduate school: $2000.

I took it and all her belongings into my own office, and when she returned from running an errand for me, she was visibly upset: "Where is my stuff!"

"Yeah, I think someone was trying to steal it, so I brought your things into my office. Don't leave them out anymore. This is an open campus; anyone can come up here."

No. Sit down. I'm not done with you.

C. died trying to get an education. The university raised money to help his parents bury him...the laptop probably set them back quite a bit. And you would come here to steal from people like him? People like my GA. Young people who want to change the world, or, at the very least, their world. Seriously?

The next time I see you on this campus, you had better be enrolled as a student here.

And what I meant is this: instead of becoming an ex-con, try becoming a college graduate instead. How about that?

And by the way, you told me on Wednesday your major was history, not English. In fact, you gave every person you interacted with on this floor a different story, which is how we figured out your true project. If you want to be successful in a life of crime, begin by keeping your stories straight.

Here's a blank notebook with a calendar. You can use it to plan your current trajectory, but it also comes in handy for writing down deadlines, taking class notes, and tracking your to-do list.

Now you can go. I hope you choose wisely.

NOTE: there is a memorial to C., and the other young man who died in the shooting, on our campus. You will find me there often. If you would like to give to their memorial scholarship fund, contact me at sanslenom@gmail.com.

Friday, October 14, 2016

I suppose it's human nature that, when a group of people we can categorize as similar makes the same mistake over and over again, our go-to is that they are lazy, sloppy, stupid, or a combination of all three. There are some problems with this assumption, and they go by the names of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and privilege, just to name a few.

Let me give you, my small audience, an example. The group being targeted in this case was "first-year college students."

There was a period of time in the not-so-distant past when students in our first-year courses suddenly started using "defiantly" in place of "definitely." This seeming epidemic became so widespread as to become the subject of many hallway grousing sessions among my colleagues. For me, with my slight case of synesthesia, the frustration I could hear people talking about looked like black smoke darting from office to office.

And "frustration" is the emotion I most want to avoid, and I DEFINITELY don't like talking about it because I just become more frustrated in my frustration. In fact, I've had conversations with teachers in which they've frustrated themselves talking about their frustrations to such a degree, I had a panic attack for them.

And that ain't cool.

"Defiantly." I turned the problem around in my mind.

"Defiantly" is not a word many people carry around in their personal writing dictionaries and is even more scarce in a person's speaking dictionary. Sure, people can read it and understand it, but it's not common usage, especially among 18-year-old adults.

So why were my first-year students typing "defiantly" instead of the word they meant?

I came up with the answer.

Knowing I was going to college, I took a semester-long typing class (fun fact: the year-long class was for students on the path to becoming "secretaries," as it was explained to us back in the day) in eighth grade. Two things mattered to my teacher: speed and "error-free" text.

Students today take a keyboarding class. The focus is the same: speed and "error-free" text.

Now, if you, dear audience, were a keyboarding teacher during a not-so-distant era, you probably taught your students to use auto-suggest and hit the "Return/Enter" key because that would increase your students' speed (important, no matter their track). There's only one problem with that strategy: "defiantly" comes before "definitely" in the global English dictionary. Stopping to check the suggestion slows one down, so the natural inclination would be to accept whatever the word processor suggested, thus, "defiantly" over "definitely." My guess is that keyboarding teachers probably looked for the obvious typos, not at actual content, not at ensuring the sentences made sense, only that they were exact copies of the text to be typed. "Defiantly," being an actual word, would register in the teacher's brain as "definitely," simply because that was what the brain was expecting and it looked "right." Given these criteria and being as busy as public school teachers are, I would have missed it, too, in their situation.

So my students were making this mistake, not because they were lazy, sloppy, stupid, or a combination of all three. They were making it because they had been taught to use a word processor as efficiently as possible but NOT as effectively as possible.

I'm going to be honest: If they gave a Nobel Prize for laziness, I would win it. Seriously, I would go down in history as being the winner above all other winners. But I don't think laziness is some sort of malignancy. I'm lazy because I detest doing the same thing twice. In my mind, I should've washed the dishes one time and said, "Okay, I did that! On to something new!" And I'm not the only one: "Laziness" is the mother of invention, not "necessity," as the saying goes. Laziness is the reason we have dishwashing machines. Someone said to herself, "My time would be better spent on something else. Let's come up with a solution that doesn't involve me running hot water for the dishes, soaking the dishes, scrubbing the dishes, rinsing the dishes, putting the dishes in a dish drainer, drying the dishes for the next batch, and putting the dishes away." (It turns out, the repetition of the dishwashing machine I bought was more onerous than washing the dishes by hand, so I got rid of it. Irony.)

Because I understood the cause of the problem my students were having, I was able to address it. First, I taught them the simple act of going to "Edit"—> "Find"—> "Replace." Thus, they had learned a skill to replace a single mistake made throughout a document quickly and easily.

But then I asked them a question: Why are you using -ly words in your writing?

Invariably, the response was "because I want to show the importance of what I'm saying."

Well, you can do that with "defiantly," but guess what? You can't do it with "definitely," "really," "very," "truly," "actually," and (sadly, from my perspective), "literally." Overused words, especially adverbs, weaken your prose. Concentrate on more nuanced words instead.

So, during the next class, we spent time exploring the thesaurus, discussing the word "nuance," and choosing more powerful words for a boring, meaningless, and vague paragraph I wrote for the purpose of the lesson.

The moral of this story is this: If you find yourself complaining about people you lump into one group (students, faculty, people of color, Europeans, older adults), the problem you're complaining about might be yours to solve. Also, put your magnifying glass away because you're missing the bigger picture.

I hate to be a downer. But that headline is a fact. And I was asked by a friend to explain this for the people who might not be aware, which is my assurance this is important and y'all need to know.And I will now issue what I feel is a proper trigger warning. Don't read the rest of this if you have been the victim of sexual abuse, domestic or dating violence, sexual assault, or any form of human trafficking. You already know how this story goes. Also F-BOMB alert!I have been researching the problem of human trafficking for a number of reasons. For one, I wanted to write a grant to provide technical assistance training to prosecuting attorneys, people in the hospitality industry, health inspectors, salon inspectors, social workers, among others, to learn to recognize the signs of possible trafficking. More arrestingly, it was because of the story of Arkansas State Representative Justin Harris and his wife Marsha, who introduced me to the term "re-homing." The Arkansas Times (see the above link), a true bastion of investigative reporting, did a far better job of outlining the facts of the case than I can, so I'll keep this to a summary. The Harrises, who earn most of their income by operating a private Christian pre-school in northwest Arkansas, adopted two children out of the foster system they had repeatedly been warned they were not prepared to care for. The girls they adopted were in the system because, at ages 3 and 5, they had been repeatedly sexually abused and would need a level of care a normal family could not provide without significant training. When it became apparent to the Harrises they were out of their league, they "re-homed" the girls to another couple without reporting it to any regulatory agency, which was perfectly legal in Arkansas up to 2015. Eric Francis, their new "father" and a teacher at the pre-school the Harrises own, is now serving a 40-year sentence for raping the older of the two girls. She was six at the time. And now for the ultimate reason for the research I have done. My mother was the victim of a child molester at about the same age as the two girls the Harrises "re-homed." She doesn't know I know this.And I'm now shaking with ire. My mother told on THAT MAN, our uncle by marriage, when she was seven. But her sister was three, and according to my grandma, he "began" molesting them both at the same time. More likely, THAT MAN began molesting my mother at the age of three, and, when he began molesting my aunt at that same age, my mom told on him to protect her sister. THAT MAN never touched me, but he might as well because he absolutely destroyed any semblance of a mother-daughter relationship I might have had with the woman who gave birth to me. I was born at a time when the gender of a child could not be determined during pregnancy. I have to wonder what a nightmare it was for my mom being told she had given birth to a daughter, when she probably hoped I would be a son. Because in my mother's world, I imagine, little girls were hurt beyond repair. Little boys lived care-free lives. Little boys aren't immune, either.And I know this because I've read it all again and again, at first in horror, then with numbness, and finally as someone who has to be inured against it in order to fight it. But more importantly and more related to the subject at hand THAT MAN took a photo of my mother, a little girl. Naked.I know this because he gave it to my dad on my parents' wedding day. Soak that in for a second. I have, literally, tried to express my anger about this, and, frankly, I can't come up with any words. I'm speechless.In THAT MAN's world, he owned my mother first, and it was he, not my grandpa, who was giving her away to someone else. Sick fucking bastard. The product of a sick fucking system where children, girls, are goods to be sold or "generously" given away.My grandmother threatened him and his wife with a gun. As she explained to me, just prior to a visit with him and his wife at a sort of family reunion when I was 11, it was her only recourse to save other girls. In those days, "We didn't talk about that stuff, and the police wouldn't have believed her [my mom]." I'd like to write a superhero comic about my grandma: her outfit would be made of the flour sacks her own clothing was made of back in the day. But, in this one instance, I don't think the gun or her threat had the power it should have. I think it made THAT MAN more determined. If there was one picture, there were probably more. And they were most likely part of an illegal trade among other sick men who could easily get away with selling their "wares" in the 1950s using the U.S. Postal Service and vague newspaper ads. In essence, my mother was a victim of human trafficking. Her unclothed childhood body was likely sold through images of it without her permission. Her body was taken from her. She never had a sense of ownership over the very thing that made her a being in the world, to reference Heidegger.And let's be honest. Eric Francis, a man who raped a six-year-old child, could have easily trafficked that child in the same way, so long as he never went high tech, where the probability of getting caught is much higher. Is this why the demise of the Polaroid was so lamented? No worries. They're available once again...because, you know, profit. So, I've shown the small group of devoted readers who follow this inattentively published blog one form of human trafficking. If you wish to continue (it'll be tough), I'll explain the myriad of other ways human trafficking is alive and well in our country. Labor TraffickingDo you want to understand "illegal" immigration fully? Read on. If you think A-rabs, "Metsicans," and all other people of color don't belong in the U.S., just go back to your regular programming and leave me alone because many of them don't want to be here. Thanks. Children of working age and adults from every country on earth are lured to the U.S. with the promise of a job by a network or group of networks that has created a system for moving people across borders with real or very-well-faked passports and visas. I'm being too polite. These aren't networks or groups of networks: they're Triad; the Serbian and Russian mafias; and the North and South American drug cartels. They prey upon the poor, as they have always done because there is money to be made from the most desperate. Members of one of these groups walk into a town in the middle of nowhere Central or South America, Central Europe, rural Russia, China, or any southeast Asian country. (I haven't done ANY research on international human trafficking in Africa because I figure we've established the fact that Africa has been subject to widespread international human trafficking, but I should probably update my knowledge in this area and will.) These seemingly friendly "neighbors" who know the language and may even have grown up in the village, offer jobs in the U.S. and assistance getting there to people who are looking for a better way of life. So villagers sign up.Once they arrive, if they're lucky, they end up working in a restaurant, nail salon, cleaning company, etc., in exchange for a place to live (generally a tiny apartment crammed with other laborers), food, and clothing. And maybe a few dollars a week spending money. They don't complain.Let's remember what a child predator invariably says to his victim, "If you tell, you'll get in trouble," which is what THAT MAN said to my mom before she decided to tell on him. (BTW, good on her!)The perpetrators know exactly where the victims' families live because that's where the victims were recruited...in their homes with their families watching. The threat that parents and grandparents may be killed or younger siblings recruited into the same life in the very same way is very, very real. Also, their English is limited, and they may not even be able to read or write in their own language, so they don't know how to get help. And we have no way to track them, so we have no data on where then end up. What happens when they get sick, pregnant, or old? Beyond their years of providing service to their "employers"? Pfft. You know the answers to these questions. No one notices when invisible people disappear. Sex TraffickingSex trafficking makes a profit of $58 billion annually across the globe according to Sex-Crime.Law.com, which is, admittedly, a for-profit organization focused on justice for victims of sexual crimes. My guess is that the profit for perpetrators of sex trafficking goes well beyond this calculation and is far higher than any profit the lawyers at Sex-Crime.Law.com will ever see in their lifetimes of litigation. Immigrants who come to this country in the not so lucky way end up in the sex trade. Their English may be better, but their situation is worse. They are sent out into our streets, wearing minimal clothing, not knowing what's permissible and what isn't, not knowing their rights, unprotected, except for a pimp intent on making money from their mouths, vaginas, and anuses...and whatever else they can profit from. They commit the crime of "prostitution" and are subject to jail time and fines their pimps will not pay. In other words, and I hate to put it this bluntly, but it's the truth, that $15 they just made for giving a blow job in the massage parlor (talk about low wages) goes directly to the pimp. All of it. They're given enough to live on until they are arrested. Period. And when they are arrested, they are left to deal with a system that does not recognize prostitution as part and parcel of human trafficking in most jurisdictions. Those who are not legal immigrants are subject to more fines and deportation when they may have had children in, or brought family members to, the U.S. who counted on their language support and networking to get jobs...let alone what little they might provide financially. Having said that about immigrants, let's talk about "our own": foster children (natural citizens born and raised in the U.S.) are particularly vulnerable to sex traffickers. They don't know what a "normal" family is or what a "normal" romantic relationship looks like. They are in the system because they have been emotionally, physically, and/or sexually abused to such a degree the state has decided to remove them from their families of origin. Many don't make it out of the system without being groomed for prostitution by a "beloved boyfriend," a man with tangential relations to the foster family, a man who has no qualms about lavishing affection and gifts on the victim in exchange for having sex with his "friends" (and a former female victim is often involved in normalizing the situation). More importantly, when fostered young adults (again, it's not limited to females) turn 18, they are left completely on their own and are even more vulnerable because they leave their temporary families behind. Read this if you can. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/master-sentenced-torture-teen-sex-slave-article-1.1453355In the eyes of the law, these victims are perpetrators although many law enforcement agencies are starting to recognize prostitution for what it is: human trafficking. Hustle and Flow, was a great movie, not because of the rap and the main character's determination for success, but mostly because it exposed an important truth. Prostitutes don't go into the sex trade willingly but out of necessity; they are recruited. In the film, it was a case of three people trying to make it out of the Memphis ghetto, but in the real world, the prostitution system doesn't provide a way out for anyone involved. Well, except for the jerks who pay the prostitutes. You know, the guys who pay for it because they can. The fellows who prefer fellatio from a stranger. Who would promote their 10-year-old daughters as sex objects. The "regular" guys who grab women by the pussy. At the end of the day they are all slaves. That's what human trafficking is, y'all: slavery. I have quit nail salons (all Vietnamese) where I've seen a high turnover rate among workers (one way to hide labor trafficking is to keep victims constantly on the move). I have quit cleaning companies (all white women) because I wondered why the 16-year-old girl accompanying the middle-aged manager wasn't in school. I have seen prostitutes on the streets of Little Rock, and I KNOW that was not something they chose for themselves because I would not choose if for me. And, yes, I have given these women $20 without their ever having asked because I know that's money they can hide from their "master."I quote Michelle Obama: "Enough is enough."

Monday, July 4, 2016

To say that I've developed a lot of baggage over the last four years (please see the graphic on the left side of your screen) is probably the understatement of my life (or less hyperbolically ...because I love a good oxymoron) of the last four years. To whit...

One month and fifteen days before my four-year work anniversary, I have been introduced to my fourth new leader. And I'm going to refer to her as "my leader" because that's what I want: not a boss or a supervisor but someone who leads the way, shows me how to accomplish what I want, what I know will be positive change for all...and not just where I work, but out in the community, in the world. I want a "leader" because I want to co-lead with a shared vision of what is possible. What I don't want is just (so much meaning in that four-letter word) someone who tells me what to do...as if I didn't already know.

I've lost friends...due to betrayal and to death (J, your number is still in my phone as if I'll be able to reach you on the other side...though I know those numerals now belong to a stranger. Our final conversation lingers...I remember you started with, "Oh. My. God!" I can still hear your voice and see your pony tail swaying as you walked in that lovely green dress. I miss you).

I've experienced conflict with people I thought were the least likely to question my motives or ideas and who cost me important progress in my career.

We all try to maintain perspective, but it can be hard to do if you're already struggling with a mental illness (generalized anxiety disorder for me). Under a tight deadline, I function exceptionally well because I'm a writer, I live for that excitement, I know that drill, and the end is in sight.

Under constant and uncertain stress, it's a different story. What did I do wrong, and when will this end?

Under these circumstances, I withdraw. Completely. As in I haven't been to a party or out to eat with friends in months. I quit exercising because that requires being somewhere other than in front of the comfort of my horror flicks and K-dramas. There is a very private booth reserved for me every day in a local restaurant at 11:00 a.m. I've been going there to escape; the staff ensure I'm well protected from intrusion. And I've spent thousands of dollars on this luxury, no joke.

The unfortunate result is NOT just that a lot of mental baggage is sitting at my door everyday when I prepare to leave, when I leave. I've added a couple physical carry-on bags as well, and I'm not referring to the ones I keep at the ready because I hate preparing for trips, either (I LIVE to travel and keep my luggage up to date for that reason). I'm referring to those bags bulging from my stomach, rear-end, etc.

And to those who might say, "You should accept your body as it is," my response is this: "Right now, my body does not match how I think of myself: strong, athletic, capable of climbing mountains, able to throw a huge order of drycleaned clothing over my shoulder without my knees buckling," etc. (My family is in the drycleaning business; it keeps one in shape.) This is not how I am (to quote Pink Floyd).

These extra 40 lbs. don't represent how I envision myself out in the world. They DO represent very well how weighted down I feel in my heart and in my mind.

So I need to start remembering to collect my change. See, I've been through this before...back at the turn of the millennium. I had even more weight, psychic and literal to lose, eight-years' worth. I felt so stuck, I took a year off to lose all the baggage, which worked, but I'm older and don't have a year off to spare getting rid of all the spare tires.

I will admit I am the laziest person in the world. The thing is, you can always turn a minus into a plus if you ponder it long enough. A colleague and I have an ongoing discussion about how laziness is the most significant factor leading to innovation. These conversations take the form of "Yeah, Edison was the youngest, so he probably got stuck lighting and putting out ALL the candles and thought, "Eff this noise, I'm going to find a way to make this simpler."

They're really just extended and fun jokes we use to punctuate office-worker time. None of it is based in fact, actually (except, Thomas was, indeed, the youngest). Edison innovated the best electric light bulb (for the time), not the first.

And I'm not really lazy. I'd just rather be doing other things than grunt work a "boss" expects me to do because he doesn't have a vision of what I COULD do and doesn't bother asking me about my vision. Let me have a go at my vision. Let me go for a walk and take photos with my phone or camera. Don't constrain me to cleaning house, cooking, going shopping, or driving ANYWHERE. (I hate driving; it requires extreme concentration and boredom...at least if you're doing it right..and there is no other way for me).

In short, remind me I forgot my change.

Yes, remind me about the things I did in 2000 to lose weight and gain perspective and all the things I forgot (the quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies that add up after a while) I could be doing now. I was so worried about the present I was presented and not enough about the present I could make, I forgot I could still change, still grow, still be who I wanted to be because I'm the only one who is in charge of that. Not a series of weak "bosses," bad personal relationships, or untapped / un-mined conflict. (Damn! Conflict, like wind power, is a natural resource, y'all!)

Recently I said this on Facebook: "I will not wake up at 5:00 a.m. beating myself up for all the things I still haven't accomplished. Good things take time, and small incremental actions accomplish more than grand gestures thrown willy-nilly at creating change."

So here's the deal, social science research indicates that if you have high expectations of someone (yourself included), that person feels respected and respects you in return.

So it's time to collect the change from the little slide that dispenses the coins owed when paying cash.

I vow to have high expectations of the people I work with and care about. I will see my new leader as that, a leader. I will see my colleagues as co-leaders, all leaders in a vision of change...if small and incremental.

I vow to keep close the friends and family who have remained true to me because we don't know what's going to happen (watch...or not...1000 Ways to Die). And I'm letting go of the people who suck up my energy with their drama. Planet Sans is now a drama-free zone.

I vow to uplift those with whom I've had conflicts. Conflict helps us identify someone else's perspective, see where all concerned are missing the point, and find ways to help each other out. If we avoid it, nothing will ever change

Finally, I will maintain my perspective by adapting to the reality of who I am and the accomplishments I hope to make in my life.

In short, I want to condense my baggage to only those things I need, those things that will make it possible for me to travel all over the world, write, start a new career, and feel like a physically and mentally strong human being. That will not happen if I keep forgetting my change (literally, as in spending money I could use for other things, and figuratively, as in forgetting to adapt to new circumstances).

So. How does one lose mental and physical baggage? How does one start small to begin change?

I'm not an expert. Just a person who knows how to innovate in small ways and who has a few goals. Tomorrow, after doing the day gig that pays my bills and the night gig that brings me joy (that's a 10-hour day, y'all), I hope to begin giving my readers something in return. This will not only give me a chance to practice my writing craft, but also think about community and economic development. My next post will cover sustainability and food waste as related to our mental and physical baggage. I hope to complete it July 10, 2016.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

"Hate" is a really strong word, one I really don't like to use. But I, as with all of us, feel it. Sometimes very strongly and with very good reason. And I'm going to let that be okay because I think all emotions have an evolutionary protective value. When someone has personally wronged you repeatedly, there's a point at which you need to ask yourself, "What would be the better choice: 1) punching him in the throat right now? or 2) saying, 'I'm done,' and walking away...and actually being done, as in I'm not speaking to that person, except when I absolutely have to, ever again?"

At 48, I've learned a number of things. One is you can almost always avoid talking to someone for the rest of your life if you try hard enough (and, given social media, it now takes true effort), and the other is that I really don't want to go to jail.

So, because the older I get the bolder I get (I won't regale you with the CVS story, let's just say an entire group of people, including my mom, got really quiet after I had my say in one of their stores), my new rule is really a means of keeping me from incarceration, but I think it has other benefits as well, which I'll get to. But I like to go long.

Here's the rule: I'm allowed to hate up to five living individuals at any given time. And that means I allow myself a visceral response upon hearing their name, seeing them, and most especially being forced to interact with them.

To put it another way, I am allowing myself to count the number of people I hate on my right hand. This may seem arbitrary, but the way I figure it once the number jumps over to my left thumb, then I'm the one with the problem: I'm allowing hate to slowly begin to take over and pretty soon it will be in my heart.

And I don't want it there because I know what that feels like.

Flash back. If you teach in higher education, you work on a nine-month contract. Typically, the contract runs from August 15 to May 15. After May 15, you have no obligation to be on campus whatsoever. The thing is, finals are usually over and grades turned in well before the 15th. Now, my "chair" was on a 12-month contract, and unlike non-administrative faculty, had to be, literally, in her office chair from 8:00-4:30 (and really she created that obligation, no other chairperson had such a seat-time rule for herself). One year, she locked us up in a conference room 8:00-4:30 after grades were due but before our contract was up to revamp our curriculum. Yeah, she bought our breakfast and lunch, but we resented being there. And I'll be damned. After the week was up and we had mapped out all these potential changes, the decision (and I'm pretty sure it was hers) was to leave the curriculum as it was. We all understood that the entire situation had been an exercise in "I want you to see how hard I have it" on her part. And I hated her for it. And then I hated her boss. And then I hated her boss's boss. And then I hated a colleague. And then I hated a couple students who were being disruptive.

And that kept on going.

To an insane level.

Arkansas had been enjoying a remarkable stretch of lovely weather one March that I had enjoyed by reading the New Republic (still my favorite magazine) on the porch drinking a glass of wine. And, then, Ed Buckner (or whoever) forecasted a nasty onslaught of wintery weather. (Kind of similar to the current weather forecast, hence the inspiration for this post.) I went berserk. I was so pissed off at the weather, I wanted to stab it to death. My anger was so awful I was lashing out at people left and right. Any slight, any slip of the tongue, any gesture, became a reason for me to wage war.

A few years later, I quit that job over something trivial. But it gave me a year to step back and examine what had led to all that emotional upheaval. To a certain extent, it was my former boss's fault. Department chairs are experts in their field, but their field isn't usually management or leadership studies. They haven't been taught to lead effectively or share leadership, so they tend to be reactive and arbitrary...one minute you're friends, the next minute she's pulling rank and yelling at you for not guessing what she wants from you.

Here's the thing: I shouldn't have hated her for that, but I was too young to understand her situation. And I was too afraid of her to walk into her office and say, "Hey, I think you should know I'm unhappy in my work."

Now, through a series of unfortunate events, I've learned when hate is appropriate: when someone manipulates you to do something you wouldn't normally do for their own gain, lies to you repeatedly, treats you with willful disrespect, tries to tarnish your reputation among your friends and colleagues? Own your right to hate THAT person.

Just remember this, when it starts to seem like even the weather is out to get you, you may be the one with the problem.

BTW, I have four empty fingers on my right hand. I am working to keep them empty.

Also, the Hubs, my ever-faithful editor, titled this piece. And we both laughed.

Update: I thought about that last line, and I realized that working things out, being on each other's side, wanting what's best for someone else, may actually look pretty bad. Yelling, sending each other links to sites to fully inform, stomping off and saying "I'm not talking to you for a while," may be ugly but helpful in the end. Plato said it best: When you truly love someone, you want to be a better person for them.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

My dad died in 2010. Three years later, I wrote a song about him. Here is the refrain:

An absence greater than zero,
The square root of negative one,
An unimaginable number,
From this there is no sum.

You see, there is no zero greater than zero; the square root of negative one is an imaginary number, therefore, impossible to imagine...like life without someone who has always been there. And once that person is taken away, they cannot be added back.

As for my hero and stand-in dad Pythagoras, an amazing theorem, which actually makes rearranging furniture in my poky old house a lot easier, is named after him. Seriously, it's like the universe's gift to people who live in small spaces.

A2 + B2 = C2.

Genius.

In some sort of myth I created for myself, Pythagoras was accused of hubris for demonstrating that the geometry of the universe was imperfect: if a2 + b2 = 2.16666 repeating...what the hell? There is no precision in that! Hence, "Pyth" and his school had to disperse, and he most likely died of starvation hiding in a cave. Except records of the time indicate he died of natural causes at the age of 75 in his hometown after having served as something akin to mayor. Still, it's a good story.

But back to imaginary numbers.

Multiply a positive real number by itself, and you get a positive result. Multiply a negative real number by itself, and you get...a positive result. So the square root of both positive and negative numbers is always positive. But electrical engineers and physicists need negative square roots. I could discuss the position of a particle in space...and snowplows...but I wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. I think the gist is imaginary numbers make solving equations more elegant in the way that the colon (as used in writing and not pooping...although...sometimes writing is pooping) replaces a whole lot of words.

I know a lot about math.

And if you are willing to look up my second-grade teacher and explain that to her...for me...I would gladly stand behind you, peer around your shoulder, and nod my head, with my lips pursed, in complete allegiance.

Because I still can't subtract. Twelve minus eight? I use my fingers because I can't remember.

I'd like to believe this has something to do with my philosophical embrace of optimism: it is simply against my nature to negate.

The truth is, it's because of a blue crayon.

Also, I'm not philosophically optimistic. I could theoretically subtract some people from this earth for their actions and/or ideology if it weren't illegal (and against my conscience...because I do have one), and that doesn't really indicate an optimistic bent.

But back to the blue crayon.

We learned to add in first grade, we learned to subtract in second grade, we learned to multiply in third grade, and we learned to divide in fourth grade...all the while "practicing" the skills we had previously learned via worksheets filled with numbers that became increasingly longer. We had calculators in the 70s; I can only guess my teachers thought they were a passing fad. But, even as young as I was, I completely understood the concept of "work smarter, not harder" and wondered, really, what the point of all the worksheets was. I'm an educator, and I still consider all that busy work a weak attempt at scaffolding.

My second grade teacher, let's call her Ms. Break-It (which is actually an awesome play on her real last name...but I'm protecting "the innocent"), decided to try something new.

A million bad ideas have been born out of a desire for novelty, so this was not the first of its kind: we would grade our own subtraction worksheets...with the crayon color of our choice. I will never see a pedagogical value in having 2nd graders score their own work, but maybe I missed something in one of my education courses. Whatever. Black has always been, will always be, my favorite color, but it was not an option...the little weasel, a chubby boy with a handsome face and dirty blond hair, who turned me in probably got to it first. Blue was the next best thing.

We all completed the same worksheet, so Ms. Break-It could call out the correct answers. We, using the crayon-color-of-not-my-choice, marked our incorrect answers. We had been instructed not to erase. On problem number 5,678, I noticed my numeral two looked like a "Z." Because my brain is so big, I was anticipating algebra before I even knew what it was; I could not let the "Z" stand because we were subtracting, not "solving for." I used my bla...I mean...blue crayon to make the "Z" more clearly into a two. Then I realized I had "corrected" a correct answer...Ms. Break-It would be confused...she would take points off a problem I had triumphantly and with great effort gotten right!

I erased.

Goddamit, I tried to erase the crayon without erasing my answer, which is physically impossible, but I irrationally held on to the belief it could be done.

And then the weasel pointed at me and shouted, "She's erasing! She's erasing!"

I remember being called to Ms. Break-It's desk and everything goes blank after that.

Flash forward and Ms. Break-It offers us this crumb of wisdom: "Little boys are better at math and science, and little girls are better at writing and art." I guess that was supposed to make me feel better. I don't know. I wasn't the only girl in the class; there were quite a few of us...I'm guessing we made up 54% of the students? So why Ms. Break-It felt the need to proffer her newly gleaned knowledge, I'm not exactly sure.

But I was a precocious child. I remember "teaching" my mom about socialism with a chalkboard and drawings in the dining room of our home...how hard it must have been for her to hold back the laughter every time I said, "the means of reproduction." But I got it: our work is our life. To value some work as worth more than other work seemed unfair to me. The ditch digger makes clean running water possible, without which there would be no surgeons and CEOs. (Full disclosure: these lectures were prepared with the aim of increasing my allowance.)

I also knew that I couldn't name a single famous woman author or artist sitting in that classroom on that day. Every artist and writer I knew about was a man (Michelangelo, Shakespeare, KISS). And I wanted to raise my hand and ask, "If that's true, if little girls are better at art and writing, where are all the women artists and authors? I want to know about them," but I didn't know how to ask that question.

At that time, the only famous women I knew were models and actresses, and I can't even remember who they were. There was no Sally Ride, no Hillary Clinton, no Alice Walker, no Tina Fey, no Madonna, no etc. There were only a few women, like Madame Curie (Mrs. Curie), who seemed to pop up in history and then fade away as some sort of anomalous event.

So, yes, my first brush with patriarchy came when I was seven or eight years old, and, while I didn't have a name for it, I understood its message: "Women have never accomplished very much." And I figured I wouldn't either...especially since I could not fucking subtract. (Sorry, Mom.)

"Can't subtract." I feel certain this was written on my 2nd-grade report card, and I have allowed it to characterize me for 40 years of my life.

"Can't subtract." I was revising a 50-page grant a few weeks ago and I ran into a table that basically showed we intended to increase the rate of X by 10% each year over five years. I looked at it and looked at and looked at it: "That's 50%." I did the math: "We're going to increase the rate of X from 57% to 93%? That's going to be challenging. Actually, I don't think that's possible." So I knocked it down by half, still challenging but at least do-able. As I finished revising the table it dawned on me: I recognized a statistical conundrum, and I solved it. With math.

"Can't subtract." The one thing I would never say to my daughter, the thing my dad would have told me wasn't true, the thing I've said to myself a million times, is the one thing I haven't said so far, and I'm not going to say it.

Instead, I'll say, "I'm good at math. I may need my fingers to subtract, but I know how to do it."

And to all the daughters out there I didn't have...don't ever let someone else define you or what you can do.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

My friend (actually one of the most eloquent, elegant women I know and one of my undergrad profs) and I were in stop and go mode in rush-hour traffic after the second day of a workshop on race and social-justice consciousness raising. We had left about the same time the day before and were sure our moment of departure was the perfect window for avoiding traffic. Alas, we were not aware it had been storming during the workshop. We walked out of the building...the rainfall visibly evaporating from the parking lot asphalt as we walked to her car.

We left the Central High National Historic Site's visitor's center exhilarated and exhausted. We had been surrounded by young people of many races, religions, creeds, and it was exciting to know they had volunteered to be part of this experience. But opening up, telling our truths, being put on the spot...even though we put ourselves there...was scary. My friend and I, representing a project about the desegregation of Central High by the Little Rock Nine, are pretty white. She confessed that growing up in SoCal was hard because she couldn't spend more than five minutes in the sun. I confessed that rather than trying to tan (i.e., getting a sunburn), I sat in the windows of my parents' Victorian house identifying birds with binoculars. Both our families hail from middle-class Indiana, where "corn rows" has never been used to refer to hair. Telling black people, Asian-Americans, Jewish people the story of my life seemed silly. While I may be a woman, which gives me some insight into the "savage inequalities" Jonathan Kozol discusses in his book of the same name, I'm still the color of privilege. Why should anyone "of color" care about me? Of course, that was the whole point of the exercise: be uncomfortable until you find a place of comfort with the group you will spend this time with, recognize each as a person and not as somehow a representative of a color or a belief or a generation or a place.

But when I'm tired, I can't help but grouse: I wanted my pajamas and my K-dramas, and some slow-moving moron, jerk who refused to learn merging etiquette, or inconsiderate speeder caught by a cop were keeping me from my routine.

So my friend told me a story.

When my friend's older sister became engaged, she decided to have the wedding on her fiancée's farm in the Hoosier state, and she enlisted my friend, who was in college studying *mumble something that will give her identity away* to bake the cake. My friend had never baked a wedding cake in her life...but I could have easily guessed this part of the story: she researched the subject like the scholar she is, studying piping, stacking, accoutrements, mixes, recipes in the months leading to the production of the masterpiece.

The morning of the special day turned out to be warmer than usual. So when my friend set out to bake the cake...in the kitchen of a farmhouse...with no air conditioning...it didn't take long to realize the "icing on the cake" would be problematic. Calls were made (I imagine, having grown up in that time and close to that same place myself, on rotary phones), and the baked parts of the cake were moved to the home of a relative who had air conditioning...in the living room only. I can imagine my friend running back and forth to the kitchen as she stacked and piped, her fresh sunny face full of optimism and confidence.

But then she had to transport the finished cake back to the un-airconditioned farmhouse over several miles of dirt road.

She told me how she drove five miles an hour, clutching the steering wheel, scouting for every pothole while checking the cake's safety in the rear-view mirror.

She and the cake made it, and that's a story of true sisterly love. But it isn't the moral.

That person in front of you? The one taking up all your time, annoying you, making you question the intelligence of humanity?

The saying goes, "Every one of us has a burden to bear." We nod and believe we understand. But when that "burden" becomes tangible...a cake, a bad tire one can't afford to replace, cancer treatments that cause dizziness...when the reason is real, only then does the saying become truly meaningful. The person's race, ethnicity, age...none of it matters...just the burden.

So from now on, I'm going to believe there's a teetering wedding cake, loving months in the making, in the backseat of that person's car. I don't want to think about the other possibilities, and being angry for trifling reasons never gets us anywhere.